Saturday, 7 March 2015

Just for the record - Memorising the Quran

During a discussion with a guy named Shabir he proposed the Quran was a unique book because it had been learned off by heart by so many people. He argued this was because it's divine author had deliberately made it easy to learn. Although he said he didn't think this proved the divine origin of the book he argued that it begs the question.

Obviously this is non-sequitur. If the book is easy to learn it doesn't prove anything other than it is easy to learn. Even the fact that the Quran has been memorised by many people doesn't prove it is easy to learn. It is claimed the Quran started as an oral tradition and that many people knew all of it before it was ever canonised (even though various hadiths contradict this claim), and it is probably because of this story that it is seen today as a feat which can promote one's social standing. This alone is enough to create a social phenomenon of learning the Quran by heart, and considering the claimed 1.5+ billion Muslims in the world the number of people achieving this feat is neither surprising or impressive to me. At the time I thought I recalled mental imagery of young children in Madrasas reciting Quran verses over and over, being punished with the strike of a slipper or stick whenever they got it wrong; I felt it would be too impolite to mention this at the time. If only Allah had made the Quran easy to remember...

Despite not being willing to take his argument as far as claiming it proved divine authorship Shabir was very insistent that I found an example like it, in fact, he insisted that I got together with 9 or 10 of my friends and learn a book from cover to cover. Taking into account his line of thinking is non-sequitur to the point he wasn't even willing to commit to making it an argument, and how long it would take to memorise a book of similar length, and how I wouldn't want to spend the time learning a book I declined his challenge. So instead, for some bizarre reason, I ended up accepting I would prove evidence of a book of at least similar size which has been memorised by at least 10 people....but not a phone book.

Jewish people from history has a tradition called Mishna, which means to study by repetition. It was claimed that Moses received two forms of information on Mount Sinai, one in a form he wrote down and another he memorised and passed on orally. The Mishna was passed from generation to generation via oral transmission before finally being canonised for reasons of preservation, along with commentaries hundreds of years before Muhammad was even born.

This is not the only historic example. Indian Hindus have an oral history dating back thousands of years. The rote techniques for learning the Vedas are quite interesting, they consist of Vedic chants of different styles. In computer science there is a simple technique called a checksum, which is used to identify possible errors in transmission (a simple example is to use the modulo of the sum of a chunk of data); similarly the Vedic Chants act as checksums. Not only do the chants having their own system of ensuring accurate recitation, there are also different ways to chant the same information which also have their own checksums, and act as a checksum for the other methods of chanting the same information. I won't go into details, if you look it up wikipedia you will find information on these Vedic Chants.

This is such common knowledge I can't even imagine why Shabir would ask me to prove it to him, it just seemed to be a way of stalling the conversation.

Seeing as I have no links with a social culture of memorising books to impress my peers it is obvious I don't know any books off by heart, not even the children's books I have read many times. Shabir on the other hand does have links to such a social culture, which is why he raised the subject in the first place. Considering how easy he alleges the Quran has been made specifically to learn off by heart, does this mean Shabir himself knows the Quran by heart from cover to cover? Does it also imply he also has 9 friends who have done the same and they could gather together and go through the entire recital, perfectly corroborating each other's words?

I am not claiming it is easy to learn whole books. I expect it is difficult, which is why it takes so many years to achieve. I am claiming the phenomenon is a social one, it has been done before, it still happens today, just not up my street. Shabir is the one claiming the Quran is easy to learn by rote.

I'd ask him to give us a recital but I won't, because I'm not interested in hearing it and neither his success nor failure would prove anything at all.

The discussion we had was "Is the Quran man made?" Considering we have opposing views as to what the answer is then it was obvious I was going to argue for it being man made and he was expected to argue for it being of divine origin. After all, the title of the discussion was not "The Quran is man made", which would have meant I was the only one coming to the discussion with a positive claim. Hearing his argument for divine origin might have been interesting, if only he had felt brave enough to actually try arguing it.

I'd end with a statement declaring my interest in seeing a recital demonstration of the whole Quran from him and his 9 friends but I won't, for two reasons

I could never look forward to such a brain numbing experience.

I don't think he can live up to his own claim, so I doubt it will ever happen anyway.

13 comments:

I'll get around to reading this blog as soon as I've perfectly memorisedHarry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone, thereby proving my, at present, mere belief, TRUE, that J.K. Rowling was a messenger from Voldemort.

How do we know that the Quran is easy to memorize or how many have actually memorized it?

I did a quick google search and the top answer that comes back is a yahoo answers question. Not exactly a reliable source.

Other results don't shed any light on it. The Wikipedia on "hafiz" states the Quran is the only religious book to have been memorized by millions but the source is a book so I can't check that easily. It could be that this is just a claim put about by some Muslim organisations or leaders to make Islam seem special. How can we trust the figures? It would be easy to exaggerate the figures by adding a couple of zeros but I couldn't really even find any figures anyway. There is a list of Hafiz page on wikipedia but it only mentions a few dozen people who have managed this task.

Searching on youtube there are plenty of videos on tips and techniques for memorizing the Quran (why would a book that is meant to be so easily memorized need all these tips and technique ideas videos? Shouldn't just reading it be enough?). I also found a depressing video about how a Muslim woman killed her child because the child couldn't memorize it. But I couldn't see any actual recitals. Then another video which featured a few children talking about how they had managed to learn 4 or 5 pages.

I agree though even if there were a large amount it wouldn't really prove anything. It is a pretty amazing feat but it is an amazing feat of dedication by humans and shows nothing about the divinity claim.

Despite this argument being a waste of time and proving nothing about divinity, the Quran has roughly 80K words and the Bible is about 10 times as long. So it wouldn't be an equivalent feat by any means.

Also, hear is a hadith in which there is a Muhammaden command to beat children who don't pray; it is not much to extrapolate that similar physical force would also be used in getting children to memorize

http://sunnah.com/abudawud/2/105

The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: Command your children to pray when they become seven years old, and [b]beat them[/b] for it (prayer) when they become ten years old; and arrange their beds (to sleep) separately.

On youtube you see see many taraweeh prayers all over the world where the entire Quran is being recited from Memory. Your claim about Jewish and hindu scriptures being memorised, are there any youtube videos similar to the taraweeh prayers to prove your claim? What are your evidences?

you can type in taraweeh in youtube, you can see plenty of videos. the exact same pronounciation, the exact same words are recited. event if you dont understand arabic, its soo beautiful, soo mesmerising.

by the way, this so called rationaliser couldn't find 10 people that memorised a book. instead he talk about 1 person who memorised something, the challenge was to find just 10 people.